


Summer's Lease

by psocoptera



Series: Thirty Fic [15]
Category: Avatar: The Last Airbender
Genre: 30Fic, Accelerated Aging, Bending (Avatar), F/M, Funeral Customs, Kid Fic, Tattoos
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2008-01-14
Updated: 2008-01-14
Packaged: 2018-02-10 19:19:40
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,579
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2036901
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/psocoptera/pseuds/psocoptera
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Aang's hundred years has caught up with him.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Summer's Lease

**Author's Note:**

> This is both a Thirty fic (Aang is 30/130) and the first story in my Winterverse timeline of Avatar stories. The Winterverse diverges from canon after the end of the original A:tlA show, so, ignores comics and Korra canon.

Katara likes to get everyone in one place a couple of times a day, to make sure no one's injured or missing or quarreling more than usual, so she doesn't take Aang his lunch until the kids are settled at theirs. (Or at least as settled as they ever get; today when she leaves the room, most of them are lying on their backs on the long table, competing to see who can keep a grape suspended the longest in a blown stream of air. She's quietly amused to see who has and hasn't thought of picking out a really spherical grape.)

She ducks back into the kitchen and makes a tray with Aang's congee and a glass of juice, and on an impulse picks a whorled orange flower from the shrubs outside the window.

She taps on the door gently as she goes in; Aang is lying down, dozing, but opens his eyes as she approaches.

"Hey," she says, setting the tray down. "Need a hand?"

He grins at her and lifts his arms in a complex motion. Wind gusts away from him in a little puff, pulling him up as he sits.

"Vacuum's still working," he rasps. "Ooh, grape juice?"

"Yeah, and you'll never guess what the kids are doing," she says, and describes the grape-blowing game. Aang laughs.

"That's not bad," he says. "Remember those no-handed push-ups? Hm, I wonder if I could still..."

Katara looks at him with sudden alarm. He sighs and covers her hand with his, and they look down at the knobby fingers, the loose skin of the back, the age spots. "'M not going to take any risks," he says. "I *will* be here when he's ready for his tattoos."

"About that," Katara says cautiously. She's been thinking about this for awhile, wondering when, or if, she should bring it up; now suddenly seems like as good a time as any.

Aang is looking at her curiously. "Wait here a minute," she says, and he rolls his eyes at her - where else is he going to be?

She finds a certain cupboard and gathers certain items from within it. When she comes back, Aang is lifting a shaky spoonful of congee to his lips, and she waits while he sips and gums and swallows.

She sets the inkstone down, and the other things; Aang frowns when he sees the stick of sky-blue ink. "What...?"

"Wait," she tells him, and so he does. She spreads a little water onto the stone and grinds the end of the stick until she likes the consistency, then picks up the small paintbrush and takes his arm. "May I?"

He nods, always willing to try what she proposes, and she turns his arm over and carefully paints a small blue circle onto the crepe-paper skin.

"Ok..."

"I'm not done yet," she says, a little exasperated, and she holds her hand above the circle and concentrates.

The ink seeps down _into_ his skin, and Aang watches, fascinated, while she coaxes it to spread out into -

"Hey, that's a water symbol!"

"You marked me with this air spiral when you showed me the technique!" she says, cheerful with long-awaited triumph, and holds out her own arm to remind him. The blue is still sky-vivid on her firm brown arm and they  
both remember how his hands had shaken as he painted it, how she'd made herself breathe calmly, anticipating the tap. Even for such a small design, the thousand pin-prick jets of air that had forced the ink down through her skin had hurt, and she'd thought of Aang's much larger tattoos and felt a little sick. At least it was over with quickly, and maybe a bigger area wouldn't really be any worse than a smaller, if it was all at once anyways.

"I think this water method of yours hurts less," Aang says, and she smiles; after more than a dozen years of marriage, she is almost more surprised when he _isn't_ thinking what she's thinking.

"You should still use the traditional method with Sonam," Katara says.

Aang blinks at her, surprised, and she waves her hand at him impatiently. "There's a time for protective maternal instinct and there's... well, avoiding pain is not the most important thing. I think we know that well enough." He nods ruefully. "He's going to be... he's going to have to..."

Aang sighs. "I thought it was going to be so much easier for them," he says. "After everything we did..."

"It _is_ better," Katara says, her conviction still strong in her voice. "They have peace, and hope, and friends all over the world... they'll still have each other when..." As if on cue, a small flock of children swoops by the open window, chattering and laughing.

"I wouldn't do anything differently," she says forcefully.

Aang pulls his chin back mock-defensively . "You don't need to convince me," he says agreeably. "And. Katara." She meets his eyes. "Waterbending tattoos is a neat idea, but... your mark on me was permanent anyways."

Katara shrugs without any trace of apology. Aang looks down at his arm with a small smile, then takes another slow spoonful of congee. Katara runs her fingers lightly over her tattoo, tracing the spiral. Aang fumbles with the glass of juice and she reaches out to steady his hands. Once he's got it, she picks up the orange flower from the tray and twists the stem, for something to do.

_It's not fair,_ she thinks. _This should be the summertime of our lives. We should be travelling to see our friends, to show the kids the world, flying where the winds take us like real air nomads. This early frost... I hate this._

"I never liked that metaphor," Aang says. Katara looks up in surprise - that was telepathic even for Aang - and he looks wryly down at her hands. The flower is withered and bristles with thin needles of ice. She smiles sheepishly.

"For air people, autumn is the season of birth," he says, and it's true, the grass was always dry and yellow by the time she delivered. "Winter is for childhood, inside by the hearth; spring is when we come of age and go out to fly. Summer is the end of life, our maturity, when we finally let go like the grass pollen and spread out onto the wind to grow somewhere new."

"I'm not ready for you to spread out on the wind," she whispers, and he strokes his gnarled hand down her smooth brown hair. _And besides,_ she thinks, _somewhere new..._. She bites her lip.

"Hey," he says. "No secrets, now."

"It scares me," she says lowly. "That you- that you might-"

He holds her hands patiently.

"What if it's someone I know?" she bursts out. "What if it's Sokka's next kid? Someone I had to see, and I would always be wondering, and it, it won't be you."

"The next Avatar will most likely come here to train with Sonam, or whichever of them takes to teaching," Aang says measuredly. It's been a long time since he's flinched away from anything.

"Oh, I _know_ , but that's later at least," Katara snaps. "You think I'm fooling myself about any of this? Cooking your rice and wiping your chin and, and preparing for your damned _air burial_ \- " she snarls and blinks away tears.

"Hey," Aang shrugs innocently, "You don't hear me complaining about all this burning and burying and sewing into a weighted sack that _you_ people get up to..."

"Resting quietly at the bottom of the ocean getting decently nibbled by fish is a damn sight more sanitary than getting pecked apart by birds on a bedamned _platform_ , and so help me Aang if you bring this up one more time -"

Aang grins at her gummily. "There you are," he says, and Katara has to roll her eyes. "Now stop talking like I'm leaving tomorrow. I'm not _that_ old. Do I look like a hundred-and-thirty year old man to you?"

He does, he really does, he looks ancient to the point of crumbling, but Katara laughs for him anyways. It's been their joke for so long, on the Fire Nation ship, at the wedding ("looking pretty good for a hundred and seventeen"), after the birth of the twins ("not bad at a hundred and twenty-three".) It had been less funny when his hair started coming in grey, when his balance had faltered and when Avatar Vejo had appeared in a vision to explain that suspended animation could only hold back the passage of time for so long.

"Now," Aang says, patting the bed next to him and smiling, "I think my pretty wife should come sit up here next to me and grow me some of those snowflakes, you know, the big dinner-plate ones?" He waves his palm at her as a visual aid. "I always like those."

And so she does, fitting herself carefully to his side, spinning out enormous snowflakes up by the high ceiling and letting them drift down, only to wisp back into air before they hit the blankets. Aang moves his hand and there's a little waft; the gentle updraft slows them just enough to be seen in detail before they're gone. Each flake is different, fabulously complicated in some new way, and yet they're all the same, the same rules born again and again into ice. Katara snuggles closer to Aang and, together, they watch the snow fall.


End file.
